State Crime on the Margins of Empire by Kristian Lasslett

Author:Kristian Lasslett [Lasslett, Kristian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783712304
Google: vxj1jgEACAAJ
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2014-01-15T05:28:02+00:00

The Namaliu Government Declares a State of Emergency

With Australia’s weight falling behind the hawk faction, the latter now had the means to operationalise a military solution. However, this solution still required cabinet assent, and strong opposition remained. On the other hand, the conciliators’ indecision was provoking serious anxiety in the foreign investment community, whose allegiances was critical to the national economy’s health. Speaking at a more general level, Block observes in this latter respect:

Those who manage the state apparatus – regardless of their own political ideology – are dependent on the maintenance of some reasonable level of economic activity. This is true for two reasons. First, the capacity of the state to finance itself through taxation or borrowing depends on the state of the economy. If economic activity is in decline, that state will have difficulty maintaining its revenues at an adequate level. Second, public support for a regime will decline sharply if the regime presides over a serious drop in the level of economic activity, with a parallel rise in unemployment and shortages of key goods . . . In a capitalist economy the level of economic activity is largely determined by the private investment decisions of capitalists. This means that capitalists, in their collective role as investors, have a veto over state policies in that their failure to invest at adequate levels can create major political problems for the state managers. This discourages state managers from taking actions that might seriously decrease the rate of investment. It also means that state managers have a direct interest in using their power to facilitate investment, since their own continued power rests on a healthy economy. (1977: 15; see also Callinicos 2007: 544; Harvey 1982: 153; Michalowski 2010: 6)

In PNG, the vertical (between MPs and supporters) and horizontal systems of patrimony (between wantoks), so critical to regional power blocs and bourgeoisie accumulation strategies, was coming to depend more overtly on foreign investment in the extractive industries. The loss of revenues from Bougainville, and the danger of a boycott from mining capital, thus threatened to throw PNG’s political-economy into a state of crisis. Harvey notes in this respect:

[S]tates that stray too far from organizational forms and from policies that are consistent with the circulation of capital, the preservation of the distributional arrangements of capitalism and the sustained production of surplus value soon find themselves in financial difficulty. Financial crisis . . . turns out to be the means whereby the discipline of capital can ultimately be imposed on any state apparatus that remains within the orbit of capitalist relations of production. (1982: 153)

In the case of PNG, the threat of financial collapse placed the hawks in the temporal ascendancy, as they were the ones who offered the most direct method for routing the BRA and restoring investor confidence in the national government. In this strategic light, the Minister of State was able to obtain cabinet assent for a military solution in June 1989.

The news of this critical shift in the national political

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